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In the 70s, Pauline Collins rose as a intelligent, funny, and appealingly charming female actor. She developed into a familiar celebrity on either side of the sea thanks to the blockbuster UK television series the Upstairs Downstairs series, which was the Downton Abbey of its day.

She played the character Sarah, a bold but fragile parlour maid with a questionable history. Sarah had a connection with the handsome driver Thomas, played by Collins’s real-life husband, the actor John Alderton. It was a TV marriage that the public loved, which carried on into spinoff shows like Thomas and Sarah and the show No, Honestly.

The Peak of Excellence: Shirley Valentine

But her moment of greatness arrived on the silver screen as the character Shirley Valentine. This liberating, cheeky yet charming story opened the door for later hits like Calendar Girls and the Mamma Mia!. It was a uplifting, comical, bright story with a wonderful part for a older actress, tackling the topic of feminine sensuality that was not limited by conventional views about modest young women.

Her portrayal of Shirley prefigured the emerging discussion about midlife changes and women who won’t resign themselves to being overlooked.

From Stage to Film

The story began from Collins performing the lead role of a her career in Willy Russell’s 1986 theater production: Shirley Valentine, the desiring and surprisingly passionate ordinary woman lead of an getaway comedy about adulthood.

She turned into the celebrity of the West End and the Broadway stage and was then triumphantly chosen in the highly successful cinematic rendition. This closely followed the comparable transition from theater to film of actress Julie Walters in Russell’s 1980 theater piece, Educating Rita.

The Plot of Shirley's Journey

Her character Shirley is a realistic scouse housewife who is bored with existence in her forties in a tedious, unimaginative place with monotonous, unimaginative folk. So when she wins the possibility at a no-cost trip in the Greek islands, she takes it with enthusiasm and – to the amazement of the unexciting UK tourist she’s accompanied by – continues once it’s over to encounter the genuine culture beyond the vacation spot, which means a gloriously sexy fling with the mischievous resident, Costas, acted with an outrageous facial hair and accent by Tom Conti.

Bold, sharing the heroine is always speaking directly to viewers to inform us what she’s pondering. It got loud laughter in cinemas all over the UK when Costas tells her that he appreciates her stretch marks and she remarks to viewers: “Don't men talk a lot of rubbish?”

Later Career

Following the film, Pauline Collins continued to have a lively work on the theater and on TV, including roles on the Doctor Who series, but she was less well served by the movies where there didn’t seem to be a screenwriter in the league of the playwright who could give her a real starring role.

She starred in filmmaker Roland Joffé's adequate located in Kolkata story, City of Joy, in 1992 and played the lead as a UK evangelist and Japanese prisoner of war in Bruce Beresford’s Paradise Road in the late 90s. In Rodrigo García’s trans drama, the film from 2011 Albert Nobbs, Collins came back, in a manner, to the Upstairs, Downstairs world in which she played a downstairs domestic worker.

Yet she realized herself often chosen in patronizing and cloying older-age entertainments about seniors, which were beneath her talents, such as nursing home stories like Mrs Caldicot’s Cabbage War and Quartet, as well as ropey French-set film The Time of Their Lives with actress Joan Collins.

A Small Comeback in Fun

Woody Allen did give her a true funny character (although a brief appearance) in his the film You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger, in which she played the shady psychic referenced by the movie's title.

However, in cinema, the Shirley Valentine role gave her a tremendous time to shine.